Hypocrite
by superwoman1015
Summary: When had she become such a hypocrite? When had being one of the good guys become hard to justify? Episode tag to 7x12.


**Authors Note: **This is my first Criminal Minds fic. Just a one shot episode tag to 7x12. My idea on what Emily was probably going through at the end of the episode. Spoilers up to and including 7x12.

**Hypocrite **

The hotel room was stuffy, suffocating, but she didn't do anything to change that. She was a hypocrite. She pretended to be the "good guy" the one who always did what was right. But really it was just pretended. No, she hadn't been the one to put a bullet in Ian Doyle, but she'd not fought against it as much as she could have. She'd wanted to do it; she would have given the chance.

She needed to stop thinking about it. She thought about getting a drink. There was a minibar in her room, but she knew that it wouldn't do any good. From past experience she knew that all drinking would accomplish would be a head ache and dry mouth on the plane ride home. She had a pack of cigarettes in her bag, not that she smoked often, but after the last case she didn't know if she wanted to.

She turned on the TV for background noise; she needed to shut out the voices in her head. The ones telling her she was a coward. What had she told Hotch just a few days ago? That she could do her job; that she could be in the field because it was easy. It was black and white. She knew who was good and who was bad. But today she wasn't so sure she knew any more. She wasn't sure that she was the one of the "good guys".

When had it changed? When had putting the killers and rapists behind bars become the cowardly thing to do? She could have let Regina pull the trigger, could have let her get revenge, but she didn't. She had told herself it was the right thing to do. But was it?

She turned off the TV. The noise wasn't what she wanted. She paced around her room, thumb nail in her mouth, unconsciously chewing. She didn't even notice what she doing until she'd pulled so much of the nail off that the tip was raw and bleeding.

She shook her head, trying to clear it. Just when she thought she was done, when she thought she had a handle on things everything spiraled out of control. She looked at her watch, almost 4:00 AM. She hadn't slept. She stripped out of her clothes and lay naked on the bed, looking at the window. The blinds were open a crack and she could just see a sliver of sky. The moon was already down; there were no stars, at least, not in the city. She could see the light from the parking lot casting a harsh glow on the world around her.

She thought about what she would be doing right now if Ian Doyle was still alive. Would she be laying here tonight? Would she be back with the team? _Would she be able to function_? Or would she be hiding, lying to herself and those who cared about her. Pretending that she was keeping them safe. Pretending that running away was best for everyone.

She couldn't lay here, on the hard hotel room bed, the light from the window was mocking her. She was in the dark and the light was mocking her. She ran from her bed to the bathroom. She thought for a moment that she was going to throw up, that what little she had chocked down for dinner would be revisiting, but she didn't. She turned on the shower until it was hot, boiling, steam pouring from the faucet. The water bit into her skin, painful and numbing.

She remembered what it was like, laying there on the floor of that warehouse, thinking she was going to die. And then in the hospital, lying to her friends, lying to the people she loved, the people who cared for her. The months that she was in hiding, the months that she wandered around Europe and the Americas trying to find who she was. The pain, the heart ache. Knowing that she could never come back. Knowing that it would never be the same.

She was trying, pretending that everything was ok, that everything was perfect. That she was good, that there was only one way to view things. That she was helping. And it was all a lie.

She slid to the floor of the shower, the water beating down on her. She wasn't sure when she started sobbing, but she was, and the tears mixed with water, running down the drain. It wasn't as easy as she made it out to be. It wasn't as easy as she wanted it to be. She was lying to herself and it was time for her to stop.

She knew she wouldn't sleep tonight, knew that she would be haunted by the night on the tarmac, that she would be haunted by that night in the warehouse, by that night years earlier when she put Declan into hiding, that she had defied one of the worst criminals she had ever worked with. She had taken the cowards' way out.

The dawn was many hours away, but when it came she would do the one thing she had promised, she would tell Hotch that she was having a bad day. That she was not alright like she pretended; that her carefully constructed shell, put in place to protect her, had started to crack.

And then she would go back to pretending that all was right with the world, pretending that nothing had happened, and she would pretend that she was one of the good guys, because she didn't think she could make it otherwise.


End file.
